Composer Profile: Duane Tatro

Duane Tatro entered the professional world of music at the end of the Big Band days when, as a sax and clarinet player, he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra as it crisscrossed the country. Touring with Bob Hope’s show, the orchestra did radio broadcasts every Tuesday, and on the other days of the week, they performed at military bases. World War II was in full swing, and Duane was 16.

He wouldn’t have left home at such a young age, had it not been for the war, and now he feels very lucky to have learned so young that the touring life was not for him.

But music was in his blood from early on. He remembers that his mother had a subscription from Tin Pan Alley for two songs a month. When they arrived in the mail from New York City, she would play the songs, and whenever Duane heard a harmony that he especially liked, he’d ask her to play it over and over until he had it in his ear and could play it himself. “By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew my life was going to be about music,” he said. And it always has been.

Following his time with the Kenton Orchestra, he joined the Navy, where he was trained in radar repair and electronics (which served him well later, when the world of film and television music turned in the direction of synthesizers). And when the war ended, he ended up stationed with the Great Lakes Band Department, where he was involved in jazz groups and symphony orchestras. From there, he and his friend Dick Hyman volunteered to be on a ship so that they could get an early release from the Navy–and it worked.

The GI bill led to two years of study at USC, where he studied with Halsey Stevens, and then he continued studies in Paris at the Ecole Normale du Musique with the great Swiss composer, Arthur Honegger, whom he described admiringly as “a super gentle sort, almost religious about music.” In Los Angeles, he also studied privately with George Trembly, and in Paris, Darius Milhaud would occasionally take over Honegger’s classes.

While in Paris, he and some friends formed a small band to augment their stipends from the US government, and they all wrote for it and performed–music for the Lido in Paris, for tap dance routines, vocals, Christmas shows–whatever came their way. And in spite of his distaste for touring, they played as far away as Heidelberg, Mannheim, and Tunis.

Back home in the USA–in fact, back where he was born in the San Fernando Valley and where he and his wife Francoise still live–he started working in electronics, which was in its infancy, but then started ghost writing for Hollywood composers. Soon enough, one of them became so busy that he started giving work directly to Tatro, and he worked steadily in television and film music for the next 30 years.

About his favorite work in Hollywood, he includes a National Geographic documentary, Australia, a Timeless Land, for which he was asked to write nationalistic music without a hint of anything like Waltzing Matilda. He especially liked the dramatic music he did for The FBI, as it gave him the opportunity to write more adventurously than television shows usually allowed. Also, Dynasty was fun because of its high production values, including an orchestra of 35 or so players. He even boasted of sneaking some 12–tone composition into his scores for The Love Boat. And though he was adept at including synthesizers in his scores, using them only to do things that acoustic instruments could not do, he was happy to leave the world of Hollywood music as it went more and more in the direction of synthesizers.

Throughout his Hollywood career, Tatro wrote music for concert performances as well, usually between shows or during the off season. This allowed him to take chances on things he couldn’t do in his television and film work, and he always treasured the opportunity.

Now that he has been retired from Hollywood for about 20 years, he told me, “I am so pleased, so blessed that I get up every morning and want to write”–and that’s a good thing, since he keeps receiving commissions for new pieces.

His latest composition is, of course, the one he has written for Pacific Serenades. Inspired by the concert’s title, Scattering, he named his piece–which is for clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin, cello, and piano–Scatterings. Its individual movements are entitled Diffusion, Fragments, and Gathering.

Scatterings was commissioned for Pacific Serenades by Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey, who chose Duane Tatro from among our composers for this season in part because they liked contributing to the creation of a piece of music composed by someone of their own age group. In fact, Duane will turn 85 in the month after the premiere of his new piece. And as a composer of a younger generation, I find it quite an inspiration that he is still creating new work–and that he does so out of a lifelong love of music. What a wonderful way to spend his golden years!